‘One comes across a weed, and it turns out to be an orchid.’ Zen Master Yunmen

‘Thoughts arise and pass away, The preceding no different from the succeeding. If the succeeding thought does not arise, The preceding thought cuts itself off.’ Niutou Farong

‘Virtue is so feeble; Vice is so powerful and terrible! How can good ever triumph over evil Without the resolve to awaken?’ Acharya Shantideva

Photo by MemoryMan / stock.adobe.com 1. Wat Rong Khung, Thailand By the end of the twentieth century, Thailand’s Wat Rong Khun was in disrepair. As an offering to the Buddha, a local artist used his own money to rebuild it—in white.  Photo by William R. Pugsley /...

Bhikkhu Bodhi knows hunger not as a metaphor, but as a memory etched into his body. As a young American monk in the early 1970s, he began his monastic training in rural Sri Lanka at a time when the country was facing a severe economic  crisis. This forced the...

The rain clouds receded, and the October sun finally broke through as I was practicing walking meditation on a deck overlooking a small pond—my favorite place to walk during the seven-day retreat at Cloud Mountain Retreat Center. Red and gold leaves blanketed the...

What happens to us after we die, if anything, is perhaps life’s biggest mystery, one all the world’s religions try to address. The Buddhist text popularly known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead offers us a unique and very specific answer. It gives us a step-by-step...

In 2022, my mum, Michelle, was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Her diagnosis was scary and sudden. With no cure, no truly effective treatments, and an average life expectancy of just three to four years, ALS is a fatal motor neuron disease that...

In 1991, shortly after my first serious breakup, I moved into my long-dead grandmother’s apartment near Coney Island. It was far from everything and everyone I knew—an hour and a half by subway from Greenwich Village. My father and aunt had decided to keep this...

“What have my children done to my body?” Joanna Macy wailed, collapsing to the floor. Her voice broke through choking sobs, channeling the grief of a river. “How can my human children pollute me and turn away?” To the uninitiated, such raw grief might seem at odds...